The Cat Came Back

Yang escaped Friday night. Or Saturday morning. Or maybe Saturday night—I’m literally foggy on when he escaped my apartment, but if I had to bet, I’d say Friday night. He didn't sleep with me, which is weird. I looked for him Saturday afternoon a little bit, but figured he was sick and just resting. I went out and did my thing this weekend. But when he didn't show up Saturday night, I started to worry. Where WAS he????

For those of you who don’t know Yang, he's my prized black cat (Check out April, 2004)Lee got him for me when I was 24 (I'm 36 now) from the BASYS computer at CNN. Yang and I are as close as you can get, literally like brothers. For instance, he can sense if I'm depressed, and he'll actually reach out and just put a paw on my hand.

Yang is an extremely clever and intelligent cat— I’d say he has the intellect of a 10 year-old. Seriously. I’m not the type to “project”—I have a 3 year-old female cat named Kicia, and although she’s A-D-O-O-R-A-B-L-E (she follows me almost everywhere), she's just cute. I’m not going to throw her a Rubik’s Cube anytime soon.

So, Yang was lost. Here’s the short story:

Saturday afternoon. I think. Where’s Yang? Well, he sleeps weird places sometime, maybe. But I don’t see him the entire day. Come nightfall, when he’s not to be found, I panic. This morning, I searched the entire house top to bottom. I was even looking in the oven. He just was NOT in the @#$!@! house.

I put up notices on the doors to my condo building. That’s when neighbours started showing up with stories: He was outside my door, meowing last night at midnight. Another neighbour put down water for him, hoping he’d get back to wherever he belonged. The daughter of my downstairs neighbour even helped me look for him. She was convinced that he’d gotten out. But I held up hope that he was still in someone’s apartment. I mean, what would YOU do if you found a cat wandering around inside a locked, access-controlled BUILDING???? Assume he’d picked the lock with his coke-nail and wandered on in?

Turns out someone let him out—to the OUTSIDE world!!! One neighbour on the 2nd floor said that Yang was outside her window for a few hours MEOWING to get in, and that her cat, a tabby, was hissing back at him. What? He’s outside?? Some idiot actually DID let him out?? Are you @!$#! NUTS?? Only ½ block away is 14th street, EASILY one of Calgary’s BUSIEST streets!!!

Fortunately, thanks to my Atlanta experiences with cats (I had I think two hit by cars) I had NO worries that Yang would get into the street. He’s too smart for that.

So I’m panicking. It’s rained in Calgary for the past four days straight—same as it was in Atlanta, that one time I found Ed, dead at the side of 2507. So I’m thinking, no—no no no—déja vu??

But the downstairs neighbour lady was OUTSIDE walking around the neighbourhood looking for him when *I* was inside hoping someone had him in their apartment!! She buzzed my apartment and said she’d found him!! We went outside, and she showed me the cat—it was Yang all right, MINUS about 10 years. A CLOSE facsimile, but NOT Yang. I couldn’t believe it.

We walked around some more, and I thought, screw it. I’ll think like Yang. He was last seen outside the FRONT of my apartment. He’d walk to the sidewalk, and away from the traffic. So I walked and turned right, into the neighourhood. I walked up a few houses to one house (which I’d walked by previously, actually) and I walked up to the dilapidated, uninhabited (I think) house (it’s a nice neighbourhood, honest! But there are a couple very old houses up the street). There, under the rotted front stairs was a little hole in the thatch-board, with two YELLOW EYES peering out! Yang! He didn’t run. He didn’t look panicked. He just looked out at me like I was exactly the sight he was expecting to see. I pulled him out of the hole, with difficulty—it was literally the width of his head—and brought him home!

The neighbour lady has a four year-old kid. I’m gonna take that kid for ice cream and buy him a #$!@#! *PONY*, I am so happy right now. Happy ending!!!!